The Hot 10 2014: Rose's Luxury, Washington, D.C. (No. 1)

ose’s Luxury opens at 5:30 tonight. It’s five o’clock now, so I decide to do what I always do before visiting a new restaurant: Grab a pregame drink nearby. As my cab pulls up along Eighth Street in Washington’s Barracks Row neighborhood, I notice a line 30-deep. Is someone selling black-market Cronuts? Is it a political protest? No and no: These people are all waiting for a table at Rose’s, which is open only for dinner and does not take reservations.

So much for that drink.

Later, as I’m finishing my whiskey and paying the bill, I realize why those people were willing to wait two-plus hours for a table in a city whose food culture is otherwise known mostly for power lunches: Rose’s is a game-changer.

There is a lot that sets it apart, starting with the warm, farmhouse-style dining room, kitchen-counter seating, and atrium glowing with string lights. There is the knowledgeable and friendly service. And, of course, the eclectic menu: Southern comfort food threaded with globe-trotting ingredients and ideas from Southeast Asia, Mexico, Italy, and France.

While chef-owner Aaron Silverman is clearly concerned with the food that goes out on his plates, he pays even closer attention to the people eating it. And that’s when it hits me: Rose’s isn’t just in the restaurant business; it’s in the making-people-happy business.

If that feels like a revelation in dining, it should. It did to me, and it’s why Rose’s tops our list of this year’s best new restaurants.

To find out what makes a meal here so special, I spent 12 hours trailing Silverman on a weekday in early June. Let’s just say the brilliance of Rose’s isn’t by accident.

11 a.m. “This is where it all started,” Silverman, 32, tells me while standing in the dining room of his well-appointed apartment just a few blocks from the restaurant. Before opening in October 2013, he held several pop-ups here to test out dishes. He’d been planning Rose’s for years, collecting vintage glasses and sterling-silver presidential spoons at flea markets. The restaurant was named for his epicurean grandmother; the “Luxury” part speaks to his obsession with hospitality. “It’s not about white gloves and a four-fork table setting,” Silverman says. “It’s about being taken care of, and making people happy.”

Service, the Rose's Way

Hospitality means everything to chef-owner Silverman. Here are just a few of the ways he puts the guest’s experience first:

1. Comfort Is KingSilverman thought the restaurant’s original tables were an inch too high, so he spent several thousand dollars to replace them a week before opening. “Now I have 28 table bases sitting in my parents’ garage,” he says. “But it’s the little things that make a difference.”

2. Let the Freebies Flow“All of our items have a ‘from us’ version,” Silverman says. If a diner can’t decide between two cocktails, or the server wants guests to try something they didn’t order, the restaurant can send it to the table gratis.

3. Substitutions: Definitely Okay“We don’t say, ‘Chef doesn’t allow that.’ If a guest wants a Caesar salad, she gets a Caesar salad,” Silverman says. For customers with allergies, Rose’s servers will mark up a menu to let them know which items are safe to eat.

4. Don’t Forget the Loo!In addition to that rosemary-mint soap, the WC is stocked with bobby pins, a small fix for those with flyaways. “I always think, How can we make our bathroom more welcoming?” he says.

11:30 a.m. Treating customers like kings may be a priority for Silverman, but the guy has serious cooking cred, too. He’s worked with two of the most influential chefs of the past decade: David Chang at Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York and Sean Brock at McCrady’s in Charleston, South Carolina. We stop for coffee on the way to Rose’s. Silverman orders a large with cream and lots and lots of sugar. He’s got a long day ahead of him.

11:45 a.m. Rose’s is already a hive of activity when we arrive. His mom, Jackie, is in the dining room arranging flowers. (Rose’s is a family affair: Mrs. Silverman and a friend painted the floor upstairs, while Silverman’s dad sealed it, and his uncle built some of the wood tables.) “Aaron called us one day and said he wanted to go to Harvard Business School,” she recalls. “We said we’d do whatever we could to help him out. A week later he called back and said he was going to cooking school. I think he made the right decision.”

Noon Silverman meets with his two managers to go over menu changes: the crab claws with pickled-ramp-and-chive mayo are coming off; a peach salad with shiso, mint, and ricotta is going on. Reservations for the ten spots at the roof garden table—the only reservations Rose’s takes—are selling out three weeks in advance. And no wonder: The family-style meal includes off-menu items and a surprise goodie bag.

1 p.m. Silverman and his three sous-chefs discuss the ever-evolving menu. One of them wants to add crab cakes, but Silverman isn’t convinced. (“We won’t sell anything else,” he worries.) Carrot top–walnut pesto is making its debut on fusilli tonight. The kitchen is excited—and that’s key. In two weeks, Silverman will close Rose’s for a staff retreat that includes grilling, drinking, and a Hall & Oates concert. “It’s not just about taking care of the guests,” he explains. “It’s also about keeping the people I work with happy.” (Notice a theme?) After two months, any employee who does four or more shifts a week gets complete medical coverage. But it doesn’t stop there: Community is also important. Rose’s donates 25 cents per diner to the World Food Program USA. They’ve raised nearly $8,000 to date.

2 p.m. Over bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos and Peanut M&M’s, the young, bubbly staff meets for its weekly wine tasting, where the GMs walk through some of the bottles on offer. The camaraderie is palpable. “These aren’t just servers,” Silverman says. “They were hired to make people happy.” (That’s three happiness mentions for those keeping count.) As such, Rose’s overstaffs so that each waiter can interact with guests “without faking it.” They also have permission to give away food and drinks to keep customers in good spirits; extras are listed on the check as “from us.” “More important to me than who is in the kitchen is who the servers are—they’re the ones dealing with customers,” he says. “Cooking is only 20 percent of the success of this restaurant.”

__2:45 p.m.__Silverman shows me the bathroom. “Soap is one of the most overlooked aspects of a restaurant,” he says. He’s only half joking. “Two years before we opened, I knew I wanted C.O. Bigelow’s rosemary-mint soap.” Guests are so into it, they comment on Yelp.

3:30 p.m. Silverman is busy tasting. The strawberry-and-tomato sauce for the spaghetti, one of the restaurant’s most divisive dishes, is a tad too sweet. It also needs more spice. So does the broth for the lemongrass-seafood stew.

4 p.m. Staff meal is served while people fold napkins and polish silverware. Today it’s carnitas tacos, radish salad, and pineapple-mint agua fresca. Unlike many kitchens, the front and back of house here actually communicate. Like a coach on game day, Silverman gives a pep talk: His proudest moment, he says, happened just that weekend, when Billy Shore, founder of Share Our Strength, a nonprofit dedicated to ending childhood hunger in America, stopped by for dinner—and loved it. He was so blown away by the experience, he sent the restaurant a note, which Silverman read aloud. It mentioned the food, but it was primarily about the hospitality.

5 p.m. Doors open in 30 minutes, and there are already 26 people in line.

__6 p.m.__The restaurant is full and the kitchen pass is stacked with orders. There’s a peanut allergy at table 21; table 14 doesn’t eat cilantro; and table eight wants steamed veggies not listed on the menu. There’s no rolling of the eyes from the kitchen—they just do it. “It’s not a big deal to accommodate dietary restrictions,” Silverman says. “It’s just good business.”

6:45 p.m. “Harlem Shuffle,” the original version, comes over the speakers. Whether it’s Bob & Earl, LL Cool J, or Blur, music is important at Rose’s. Silverman built the restaurant’s original 2,000-song playlist; Gray V, a music-curation company, added 2,000 more. “We vote on each and every song through a Gray V app on our phones,” he says. “One time I was running some errands and got three frantic texts and four missed calls within a minute. I thought the restaurant was on fire. But it was just my staff telling me to never again play ‘Hey Baby’ by No Doubt.”

__8:30 p.m.__I grab a seat at the counter and order all 12 dishes on the small-plates menu. Nothing tops $14 except the family-style plates offered nightly. Silverman is a frying guru. Chicken-fried oysters are served on top of a raw-oyster tzatziki. Boneless chicken thighs, brined in pickle juice, are fried and served with a drizzle of honey and flurry of benne seeds. It’s some of the best fried chicken I’ve ever had—and, as a Georgia boy, that’s saying something.

8:45 p.m. People are still waiting. There are college kids hitting up their visiting parents for a free meal, groups of friends drinking like it’s Friday (it’s only Monday), and couples smart enough to know that early in the week is the best time to get a table.

__11 p.m.__The shift is over. Silverman and I grab Vieux Carré cocktails at Beuchert’s Saloon nearby. He’s a confident guy, but he seems genuinely surprised by all the media attention Rose’s has received. “I just want to make people happy,” he says. Again. Sure, it sounds like a line you’d feed a writer working on a story for Bon Appétit, but seeing is believing. And after shadowing him for 12 hours, I’m sold.

People go out to eat for all kinds of reasons. Some for the dishes, some for the service, and some just because a food magazine told them to. But at the end of the day, everyone goes back to the place they enjoyed the most. The place that is actually, you know, fun. Silverman’s understanding of this is nothing short of a culinary revolution.